Engaging Sexual Demons in Marina Tsvetaeva's "Devil": The Body and the Genesis of the Woman Poet

Abstract

To liberate … feelings of loss is the peculiar function of myths of origin, which so invariably speak to our nostalgias–R. Harrison, Forests“Devil” is a key piece in Tsvetaeva's “anti-Eden” cycle of autobiographical prose, a phrase I have coined to describe her rewriting of both the creation myth of Genesis and its Russian incarnation in the Arcadian boyhoods of Tolstoi and Aksakov. In the series of memoirs which she wrote in the 1930s, she reworked the male myth to reflect twentieth century female experience and, most importantly, to inscribe her selfdefinition as poet.